This blog is aimed mainly at advanced students of English as a foreign / second language, although it will hopefully also be of some interest to teachers. I intend it to be a mishmash of lessons, exercises and the occasional opinionated rant about the English language.

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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Even at advanced level, students whose native language doesn't have an equivalent can have problems with Present Perfect, and how its use differs from that of Past Simple.

Some aspects of Past Simple are better dealt with together with the other narrative tenses. Here I will only deal those areas where it can be confused with Present Perfect.

So I'll be concentrating here mostly on Present Perfect, as this seems to be where most problems lie, and some aspects of it I think are worth drawing attention to. Hopefully, by doing the exercises you will get a better feel for the differences between the two tenses.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

What is Unreal Past?

Unreal Past is the use of past tenses to talk about hypothetical situations. We use Past Simple, and sometimes Past Continuous, to talk about unlikely or unreal situations in the present and future, and Past Perfect for unlikely or unreal situations in the past.

I've already talked about unreal conditionals here, and have gone into some detail on I wish and If onlyhere, so in this post I'm going to be concentrating on the other uses of Unreal Past. But I do look at two expressions sometimes used with unreal conditionals - were to and if it weren't for.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Polish has two basic verbs for go: iść and jechać. Which you use depends whether you are on foot or on a horse. Or rather whether you would have made the journey on foot or on a horse in the days before mechanised transport.

In English, it is not the method that is so important, but the direction relative to the speaker or the person they are talking to. And it's the same if we are carrying something or are with someone.

I don't think many advanced students really have problems with come and go, but when it comes to bring and take, it seems to be a different matter. Practise using these verbs in their basic sense with these exercises:

Click and Drop - Wherever you see this symbol ?, place the cursor over it for instructions, using your mouse.

Answers - At the bottom of the post you will find a row of answer buttons. Click on the appropriate button and return to the exercise.

Print friendly - Each post is designed to be printable. Exercises usually appear on separate pages, or grouped together on a page. You can make a teacher copy with answers by clicking on 'Show All', then printing. Make sure you 'Clear All' before printing student copies. I strongly recommend doing a Print Preview first. You might want to change your margins and you certainly won't want to print every page.

Update - On newer posts, many of the exercises are individually printable. Just click on the print button, and they will appear in a new, easily printable page.

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About Me

Hi. I'm a common-or-garden TEFL teacher living and working in Poland. My background is British, Scottish to be precise.
I am definitely neither a linguist nor an expert on grammar, simply someone with a healthy interest in my language and its development.